1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of information networks, and more particularly relates to the provision of network services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's networks carry vast amounts of information. High bandwidth applications supported by these networks include streaming video, streaming audio, and large aggregations of voice traffic. In the future, these bandwidth demands are certain to increase. To meet such demands, an increasingly popular alternative is the use of lightwave communications carried over fiber-optic cables. The use of lightwave communications provides several benefits, including high bandwidth, ease of installation, and capacity for future growth.
The synchronous optical network (SONET) protocol is an example of the protocols employing an optical infrastructure. SONET is a physical transmission vehicle capable of transmission speeds in the gigabit range, and is defined by a set of electrical as well as optical standards. SONET's ability to use currently-installed fiber-optic cabling, coupled with the fact that SONET significantly reduces complexity and equipment functionality requirements, gives local and interexchange carriers incentive to employ SONET. Also attractive is the immediate savings in operational cost that this reduction in complexity provides.
SONET networks have traditionally been protected from failures by using topologies that dedicate something on the order of half the network's available bandwidth for protection, such as a ring or mesh topology. Two approaches in common use today are diverse protection and self-healing rings (SHR), both of which offer relatively fast restoration times with relatively simple control logic but do not scale well for large data networks. This is mostly due to their inefficiency in capacity allocation. Their fast restoration time, however, makes most failures transparent to the end-user, which is important in applications such as telephony and other voice communications. The existing schemes rely on 1-plus-1 and 1-for-1 topologies that carry active traffic over two separate fibers (line switched) or signals (path switched), and use a protocol (Automatic Protection Switching or APS), or hardware (diverse protection) to detect, propagate, and restore failures.
An alternative to the ring topology is the mesh topology. The mesh topology is similar to the point-to-point topology used in internetworking. Each node in such a network is connected to one or more other nodes. Thus, each node is connected to the rest of the network by one or more links. In this manner, a path from a first node to a second node uses all or a portion of the capacity of the links between those two nodes.
Networks based on mesh-type restoration are inherently more capacity-efficient than ring-based designs, mainly because each network link can potentially provide protection for fiber cuts on several different links. By sharing the capacity between links, a SONET network using a mesh topology can provide redundancy for failure restoration at less than, and often substantially less than, 100% of the bandwidth capacity originally required. Such networks are even more efficient when traffic transits several links. Unfortunately, mesh topologies have exhibited relatively long restoration times, often on the order of 10 minutes or more.
The provision of services using such networks has historically been found wanting, however, due in part to the physical limitations of such networks. Users of such networks have only limited options when requesting service, and normally must contend with some or all of the following: long delays in the provisioning of service, increased costs associated with the large amounts of redundant bandwidth required, relatively long restoration times, and other such disadvantages.